1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to captioned radio which is a simple technique employing an audio program and character generator, operating in a synchronous and organized manner for television viewership, especially for distribution on cable TV systems. In particular, the invention relates to the reversal of the delivery priority of television presentation. According to the captioned radio invention, the audio bears more importance on the communication than does the video. In effect, the invention allows a television receiver to act as a radio with associated printed data displayed on the TV screen. The invention also relates to a process for creating a program on a magnetic audio tape having first and second channels wherein the program is comprised of an audio message captioned with a video message of character generator signals.
2. Description of the Prior Art
U.S. Pat. No. 3,865,973, issued to Masuda, et al.; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,898,376, issued to Nabeyama, et al., disclose the concept of a receiver for receiving a composite signal which consists of a multiplex video and audio signal. These patents disclose that the audio and visual signals are necessarily synchronized in order for the presentation of the receiver but require a much more complex system and are not specifically directed to displaying still characters on a television screen with the audio broadcast being the main component.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,891,792, issued to Kimura, is directed to the concept of displaying multiple images on a television display tube wherein one of the images comprises alpha-numeric characters which are superimposed upon the moving display. There is no coordination in the Kimura patent between the audio broadcast and the alpha-numeric display.
The system in U.S. Pat. No. 3,956,579, issued to Doumit, employs scheduled information which is alpha-numeric in character and displayed in conjunction with video and audio messages. However, in this system, the audio and still video signals are not broadcast from a magnetic tape. Rather, the still image is delivered from focusing a television camera on a slide and simply broadcasting the output from the camera in a conventional fashion. This requires extremely expensive and sophisticated equipment.
Generally, the prior art fails to disclose the use of a magnetic audio tape having a plurality of channels which synchronously carry an audio message and a video message of character generator signals. In addition, the prior art fails to disclose an apparatus for employing such a tape wherein an audio tape deck is employed to convert the audio message into an audio channel and to convert the video message of character generator signals into a signal for driving a video character generator to display the video signals on a cathode ray tube.